Patterico Investigates

On November 13, there was fighting of some sort in Ramadi. The Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. military had carried out an air strike that “killed at least 30 people, including women and children.” Patterico saw an email from an officer who had participated in the fighting that day, who said the Times’s account was wrong: there had been no airtrike, and those killed–by tank and small arms fire–were insurgents caught in the act of placing IEDs, or trying to steal munitions from an American vehicle (bad idea).
Patterico wondered: what really happened in Ramadi? Was there an air strike? How many were killed? Did they include women and children? And, perhaps most intriguing, who was the L.A. Times’s unnamed source in Ramadi? Was he, perhaps, a stringer with ties to the Iraqi insurgents?
Patterico didn’t just wonder; he decided to investigate. Read the results here. Patterico’s findings are significant, I think, to all of us who try to make sense of the news coming out of Iraq.